Nobody Remembers the Henchmen
by LocalEccentric
Summary: Nobody ever asks the henchmen how they felt about being second banana to the villain. Nobody every questions why the henchmen turned bad in the first place. But the weasels were doomed from the start, it seems. Here's a look into the minds of the villains who framed Roger Rabbit. (I was helped a lot with this by @ToonPatrolOFCL on Twitter aka @los-angeles-toon-patrol on Tumblr)
1. Chapter 1

"Nobody Remembers the Henchmen"

The Biography of the Toon Patrol, as voiced by Smart-Ass, the boss weasel. Edited by the poster.

Prologue

Excerpts taken from a work by noted toon author Professor Maximillian J. Borington. " _The Influence and Principles of Toonkind in Modern Animation"._ Crazy House Publishing Co, 1959.

 **From Chapter 1: What is a Toon?**

"A toon is any living, sentient character or object from an animated cartoon. Toons themselves have existed primitively since before 1900, in the form of cave paintings. These hunting scenes would move and dance on the cave walls of early humans, and legends have also been told of medieval manuscripts with "living" pictures. There were also the early projectors, such as the Praxinoscope from 1877, which were strips of pictures placed on the inner surface of a rotating cylinder that were projected onto walls, followed by a predecessor of the modern camera, the Théâtre Optique, invented in 1889. But these distorted, projected moving images are _not_ toons; not as we know them today. Historians say that the first cartoon characters to be featured in an animated film, the first true toons, starred in 1908's 'Fantasmagorie', which showed a small stick figure encountering surrealistic morphing objects. These characters were brought to life using layer upon layer of projected images made of ink, paint and paper until they began to move around, on their own power.

It was a mystery up until this point how projecting layer after layer of sketches onto the very air the animators were surrounded by could create an artificial life form, but it was soon found to be the projecting of three-dimensional points onto a two dimensional plane …..combined with the physics of holography….and light rays…. that was the principle reason for the toons' ability to interact with the real world. The modern system of using celluloid sheets in animation is based on a system created by John Randolph Bray and Earl Hurd and was invented circa 1912. The celluloid, ink and paint added the depth and perspective to make these characters look and feel as real as humans. What gave them life was and is still a mystery, but the personality depended on the purpose the toon was drawn for (more on this later in the book)…..

Toon creation is not an exact science. Toon destruction, however, we are grasping more of an understanding of. Previously, the only way known to kill a toon was practically suicide; the toon would laugh until he died. Their forms can't sustain such intense emotion, so their physical remains are left behind, while their souls float upwards towards Toon Heaven (complete with harps, wings and haloes). It wasn't until 1942 that a permanent way to kill a toon was discovered: a solution of equal parts turpentine, acetone and benzene, nicknamed "the Dip". Dip, now illegal to produce, is the only way to kill the toon's soul as well as his physical husk. The only way, some theorize, around this rule is to re-draw the toon using the original cel sheet. This is not always a way to "bring them back", because they might not re-gain their original memories from before they were dipped. As this process is highly illegal, there is no way to do any kind of further research on the matter. (And we _**do not**_ recommend you try this at home. We know several have tried. You know who you are).

 **From Chapter 2: A Brief Introduction to Cartoon Physics**

….Toons were drawn, of course, depending on the situation the writers dreamt up. As color and sound were added, the animators became masters at creating toons with a variety of unique personalities. Each toon was individualized, and given a voice, a personal soundtrack of noises made when coming into contact with the physical world (such as a bonking sound when bumped on the head, or a slide whistle for rising up). This also is a factor of cartoon physics. Often turning the laws of human physics on its side, toon physics are as surreal as many of the characters, enabling toons to have an incredible array of abilities. Noted examples include being able to survive a number of injuries, walking off the edge of a cliff and gravity only taking effect when the character looks down, being flattened, and then inflating himself back into his original shape. Because of the combined efforts of the animator's imaginations, and the elasticity of the toon form, there is almost no limit to what a toon is capable of doing. Toons also have an innate sense of comedic timing, often referred to as the Rule of Funny.

This includes Fourth Wall Breaking, the infamous "shave and a haircut" routine: one toon knocks or taps the first few syllables of "shave and a haircut", and the other replies with the customary "two bits". (This is often used as a method to draw a toon out of a hiding spot, for, the toon can't help but reply "two bits" simply because it's humorous for him to inconvenience himself by making the reply). A list is currently being complied of the official Toon Laws of Physics. Official laws include, but are certainly not limited to, "Any vehicle on a path of travel is at a state of indeterminacy until an object enters a location in the path of travel." (When a wolf or coyote looks both ways down the road, sees nothing, but gets run over by a bus as soon as he tries to cross.) Or "Any solid body passing through solid matter (usually at high velocities) will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter" (The silhouette of passage in the shape of the toon passing through it).

To quote Disney animator Art Babbit, "Animation follows the laws of physics—unless it is funnier otherwise." Toons are allowed to bend or break natural laws for the purposes of comedy. Doing this is extremely tricky, so toons have a natural sense of comedic timing, giving them inherently funny properties. This is also discussed by Mr. Walt Disney, in "The Plausible Impossible", a 1956 episode of the Disneyland TV program "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color".

 **From Chapter 3: The Different Types of Toons**

…There is a marked difference between toons who are character actors, and toons who, simply put, are their characters as seen on-screen. Toons who are character actors are different from their on-screen portrayal. A perfect example of this is a toon named Baby Herman, formerly under contract to Maroon Cartoon Studios in Hollywood. In the studios' shorts, he is shown to be an innocent little baby with a high pitched voice, often speaking in baby talk. Off screen, however, he has the voice, personality, and vices of a middle aged man.

Toons who are their character are less versatile. They are produced only for a select few cartoons or movies playing that role over and over again until they are no longer needed. It isn't that they play the role so often that they end up believing that they are the character (though that has been known to happen), rather that they are chosen to BE that character when being animated. Noted examples include Pinocchio, Cinderella, and, most recently, Sleeping Beauty.

A toon who can find himself in a variety of situations (i.e.: Bugs Bunny) is a good example of a toon who IS their character, but is also capable of playing multiple roles, as is dictated by the animators.

Multiple versions of toons sometimes occur when they are presented in different media. This does not apply to a change or update in the style of a toon; these updates are layered over the existing form of a toon like layers of glaze on a piece of pottery. Comic strip characters are also capable of becoming true toons if they are animated and star in a cartoon short (i.e., Superman). In this case, and in many similar ones, that character exists in both comic strip and animated form.*

*Comic strip toons are similar to regular toons in the fact that they are sentient beings made of ink and paint. However, these toons are silent. They, too, work under directors, producing comic strips via multiple series of photographs. The only other difference from their talking cousins is that they are two dimensional, like a paper doll.

Toons, as previously mentioned, are also capable of believing they are their characters. Commonly due to a workplace accident, these unfortunate toons suffer some sort of physical trauma or undergo some form of stress, and this causes a shift in their personalities. The best known example of this was a toon named (The Toon of a Thousand Faces) Baron VonRotten; a freelance toon actor during the early 1940s, specializing in the ability to shift his form to suit almost any role. He was playing the off-camera role of Man in the 1942 Disney film, "Bambi" (citation needed) when he suffered an unexpected head injury that left him no time for him to turn the situation into a gag, and woke up believing he was truly the villain he was playing.

He is also one of six known examples of toons who became physically and emotionally corrupted (the other five being the members of the Los Angeles Toon Patrol, a countywide law enforcement agency designed to work as a liaison between T.P.D and the Toontown City Courts).

A toon becomes a bastardized version of his former self when he suffers emotions close to that of a human, such as intense rage, fear, or jealousy. These toons become "real" evil, as opposed to "toony" evil; it warps the celluloid, curdles the ink and cracks the paint that form them. VonRotten went on to commit a series of crimes with his newfound villainy, most notably, the attempted destruction of Toontown using vast amounts of the Dip as part of the Great Streetcar Scandal ( _United States v. National City Lines Inc.- 1948_ ), and the murder of Gag King, Marvin Acme.

 **From Chapter 4: A Home for the Toons**

Toons were scattered across the globe, working like human actors for money in short animated films. It wasn't until the early 1920s that a group of Los Angeles animators decided that they needed a place to house these creatures, keeping them on hand for whatever cartoon needed to be filmed. While it was simple to force a few animated cats or mice into being, animating a cartoon town was going to be far more complicated. Nobody had ever animated a town in the same manner in which they animated smaller characters, but it was eventually done by piecing sections of projected, layered celluloid, ink and paint. A location was needed to house this town, and one of the backers for the many of the early animation studios, Marvin Acme, offered the backyard of his property in the Hollywood Hills, near the Griffith Park Observatory as the place to build the town (Acme would later go on to own Toontown itself and build a factory on its border, making movie props, practical joke items, and various cartoon objects both living and nonliving before his murder in August, 1947).

More than a thousand animators worked for seven years to do a section of each building at a time, finishing work on the town in the autumn of 1926. By end of the next decade, the town would experience a population boom, adding section upon section devoted to each generation of characters (toons with synchronized sound, color, etc.) creating almost a timeline showing the progress of animation techniques. By the late 1930s, Toontown was a bustling mini-metropolis with its own legal system, police force, mail service, and was officially made a district of the city of Los Angeles in 1938. The whole environment has an imaginary, fantasy, almost dreamlike atmosphere. Not only do cartoon characters live there but even the buildings, cars, plants, and such are all animated with their own personalities, speech patterns, stylistic movement, and other anthropomorphic traits that are impossible in reality.

Toontown exists as an ever-expanding city in a few acres of property. The size of the property is inadequate for any normal city, but toon physics dictating the rules in this instance, Toontown almost exists in another world, capable of growing, yet not appearing any larger from the outside. Similar to the concept of a tesseract, the combination of "real world" and "toon" physics for this unique town has caused physicists to coin a new term for a surrealistically massive interior with a comparatively small exterior: a "Tooniverse" or "Looniverse", which not only encompasses the town, but Toon Heaven and Toon Hell…."

"Toontown is home to the most unique architecture anywhere on earth. Rivaling the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, Toontown's infrastructure features a wide variety of anthropomorphic buildings (often sentient), rubber-like roads, removable lane markers (which are useful for getting one's enemies off your trail when you peel them off like tape and move them elsewhere so they follow the lines to a dead end), literal drawbridges (one must physically draw the bridge across a gap in the road)…. The buildings and other surroundings range from the bright pastels of the modern district to the eerie, silent black and white flickering structures of Old Toontown, to the menacing buildings, decrepit and angular, of the sad, neutral tones of The Wrong Side of the Tracks. This neighborhood is home to many a ne'er-do-well, part of Toontown's extensive Underworld. Also unique to the town are visual metaphors, such as a large dressmaker's pin falling from the sky in the early hours of the morning when the town is _quiet enough to hear a pin drop_. As toons are very literal (once again, the Rule of Funny) you'll find little comedic gems such as this sprinkled throughout the town's landscape…"

"Humans are also susceptible to the physics of Toontown, and thus are able to perform feats that contradict the laws of physics in the human world. In addition, anything foreign to it such as objects (and occasionally people) from the real world have also been known to become animated once being exposed to the Toon environment. This makes it remarkably fun, yet also extremely dangerous for humans. For one example, we look back to the murder of private detective Theodore J. Valiant in 1942. He was crushed to death by a grand piano which was dropped 15 stories to the ground below by Baron VonRotten. The piano was a foreign object smuggled in from the human world, and was not able to become animated due to the nature of the situation it was in, therefore rendering it harmful to the human visitor. It is almost as if the town has a sense of when to use the rule of funny, and when not to. Sometimes, one hears background music emanating from the air around them, almost as if the town itself in in a friendly conspiracy to add a bit of drama or humor to your visit, making you feel like you're a character in your very own cartoon…"


	2. Chapter 2

To understand the basics of what I'm going to tell you, you had to get through that boring prologue. "Toons blah blah blah….", "Celluloid and paint, yakkety yak..."…But notice what the book doesn't mention. It was written in 1959; the Civil Rights movement was heating up, segregation was everywhere, still. Well, toons went through the exact same thing. These kinds of books never mention the hatred, the separation or the general…fear that humans had for toons in the late 1940s through the 1960s. It was better for them to keep us corralled in that pastel ghetto, like...well, characters in a fairy tale. Eventually, that's what Toontown was thought of until "Roger Rabbit" came out in the summer of '88. Toontown had earned its place in the dustbin of obscure cinematic history until that movie got the public interested in it again. But never, not even once did anybody ask us how we felt about it.

The book barely devoted one sentence to our role in Toontown's history; they just said that we were five weasels who turned sour. But did they ever ask us why? Well, we had a damned good reason. Let me explain what the book never told you.

In the early 1940s, things were rough for toons; we were drawn, we acted, and unless we proved to be popular, we were dumped by the studio. We, as background characters, were pushed around by the directors, had no rights for ourselves, and had no real, effective unions to make sure we had good working conditions, good pay, and what have you. Our first film role was in the Disney flick, "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad" (1949). It was a small role, playing a group of weasel thugs, but we were specifically drawn for that movie. That was something that happened a lot, back when Disney still did short films; characters for small roles were drawn for that role, and then tossed away after filming was done, leaving the toon to fend for himself. There were originally seven of us, and you can see them if you ever watch the "Mr. Toad" half of that cartoon short. Filming began in late 1940, and we were drawn in mid-June of 1941. I'll talk more about why the release was delayed 8 years later on.

The release of the film was delayed due to an incident on the soundstage next door. "Bambi" was finishing up filming around the same time we were, and there was an accident with one of the actors next door. Baron Von Rotten, who was cast to by the guy who bumped off Bambi's mother was fighting with one of the directors about his pay, along with nearly all his scenes, being cut. If there's one thing nobody likes, it's going unnoticed, and let me tell you, you could hear Von Rotten and Sam Armstrong arguing clear to China! The book I quoted from was half right about that story: the bump to the head coupled with the inability to laugh it off, it became deadly. He meant to make a dramatic exit, but because he was mad almost to the point of literally exploding, he walked straight into a camera, causing the accident. The anger he felt reached a boiling point. He was sick of toons being treated like scum by the money-grubbing directors, sick of the background characters getting stepped on while the lead got the love of millions. Even the Toon Actors Guild, that he helped form in 1923, was basically useless: it was basically there only on paper to say that the toons had some kind of legal representation. It was a powerless group that at the mercy of the animators.

So that anger…a toons body isn't meant to hold that kind of intense emotion. It's why we die if we laugh too much. Only in his case, the extreme anger caused him to snap. He truly believed he was meant to be a villain (we think that was because of the head bump). But the rage definitely changed him. He went sour, and when a toon goes sour, they become really, truly evil. Not your typical cartoon evil, where it's just mischief or typing a screaming girl to a railroad track… you become pure evil. Evil at its finest. Toons are creations of pure innocence, but when a toon becomes corrupted, they become evil and black. Worse than Hitler, worse than a serial killer. Worse than anything you could imagine, because it's a kind of an anti-innocence.

So imagine what an indestructible creature who's absolutely evil could possibly be capable of? Well you don't have to. You already know most of it: Von Rotten, a master of disguise in his days as an actor robbed a bank, killed a detective and used the stolen money to disguise himself as Judge Doom, our old boss, and bought the election for Judge of Toontown in 1942.

You can see a not-really-accurate portrayal of what happened to Von Rotten in the comic book, "Roger Rabbit: The Resurrection of Doom". It's not quite what happened, with him getting brought back to life by our brothers a week after he died (it was two years after), but it's a good visual aid for you chumps who don't want to read the rest of this story.

So due to the double whammy of Von Rotten's accident coupled with the outbreak of World War Two, our movie was put on the back burner. The seven of us were given our paychecks and thrown out with nothing but that, and the clothes on our backs. When we asked for a recommendation of where to stay, or if they'd be needing us again anytime soon, we were told point blank that we were on our own, and it was highly unlikely that they'd need us for anything anytime soon.

We were never named in our first film, not even in the credits. Heck, we never even got official names! And that was probably the beginning of the end for us; everybody knows that if a toon isn't named when he's first drawn, they always end up in the gutter after filming finishes. The names we got, along with the voices, clothing and personalities were given to us afterwards when we were supposed to be in another film: an unmade cartoon short from 1942 called "Madame XX". Starring Donald Duck as a private who gets entangled with a foreign spy, Madame XX, he tries to deliver secret plans to the war office only to have them stolen by XX. He chases her by boat only to get his foot stuck in the stern line. We were supposed to be Madame XX's gangster friends; background characters, but we were supposed to stop Donald from following XX only to mess up, and accidentally let him escape.

We were left with an unfinished movie, new identities, and no place to go. So there we were, the seven of us: me, Smart-Ass, the mob-boss stereotype a la Al Capone, Greasy, the Zoot Suit Riot lookalike, Wheezy, the chain-smoker in a porkpie hat, Psycho, the insane asylum escapee clad in a straightjacket, Stupid, the group's muscle, with his beanie cat and untied shoes, Flasher, the lewdest one of us all, who would open his trench coat revealing his Valentine heart boxers and Slimy, the fashion forward greaser who dripped slime from his nose. We had no home, no job and no future. That was it. That was the final straw! We were beyond furious! I think it was then, coupled with the abuse we suffered at the hands of the directors, that made us go over the edge. That was the point where we felt ourselves changing. Nothing looked as happy or bright as it used to in sunny old Toontown. Not to us. That was the last nail in the coffin, and from that moment on, we were rotten to the core…


	3. Chapter 3

It was like this that a tall skeleton of a man, Judge Doom, found us in December of 1942. We had heard about him thanks to our cousins. Our deceased cousins, a group of hyenas, were hired by Doom as a type of personal police force, loyal to him, but working for the Toontown Police Department. The hyenas were a failed experiment to gain the attention of the city council of LA to make an official group of law enforcers to act as a go between for the police department and the Toontown city courts. They were just about to sign on a group of humans to be the Toon Patrol (something they wanted to do anyway, because to then, who would trust a toon with an official job for the city?) Doom begged them to give us a try. He said we had a natural gift for the work, able to perform tasks that hyenas were incapable of doing because they were prone to laughing till they died. We, he assured them, would be far better at the job because we knew every nook and cranny in Toontown like the backs of our hands. We were far less toony than our hyena cousins. After all, we worked for Disney, so we were made of "better quality ink and paint" than, say, a Warner Brother's character or a Fleischer or a Maroon.

They agreed to give us a try. We had a month to prove ourselves worthy of the job. We had no skills other than acting, so what were we going to do? Well, we did what any actor would do: we improvised. We bumbled around the streets in a rickety jalopy shooting our handguns everywhere, but we took lessons on shooting and investigating from Doom himself. We didn't know it at the time, but it was his own skills as an actor that made him a perfect trainer to refine our raw talent. He was working as the stereotypical masked bandit in horse opera cartoons (what we in show business called westerns) and using those skills, he taught us to shoot, interrogate, and even take protection money. By the end of the month, the seven of us were top-notch marksweasels, masters at giving the third degree style of interrogation (basically, using brute force until they talk) and introduced us to the underworld of Toontown, where all the leaders of disorganized crime did their deals. This, he explained to the city council, was necessary to acquaint us with every known type of criminal in Toontown, and to get us a foothold with the Disorganized Crime division of the police department.

Wanting to be rid of the matter as soon as possible, the city council set us up with a job, a salary, and a converted 1937 Dodge Humpback Panel Truck outfitted with a siren, the LA city seal, and a decal reading "Toon Patrol". They dismissed us quickly because they were sick of dealing with absolutely anything related to Toontown, and we were pretty much eft to our own devices over there. Unless it concerned Los Angeles or any of the human visitors there, they didn't care. After all, they were still reeling after Detective Teddy Valiant's murder that August (ironically the same day Bambi was released). This began our lives as the most feared law enforcement agency in Toontown.

This is very important. You have to understand that this was a time when toons were banned from restaurants unless accompanied by a human. This was a time where our kind were either highly paid actors, cheap entertainers, waiters or public servants, doing maintenance jobs and such that were too dangerous for humans to do. Though there _was_ an attempt made at a Toon Platoon, a special division of Nazi fighters who were drafted early in the war. This failed because nobody realized it was against a toon's nature to kill anybody. Now if _we_ fought in the war, we'd probably have ended it the very next year, but we were needed on the home front. Anyway, toons were pretty much confined to Toontown. Most humans in Los Angeles either barely tolerated, disliked, hated or even downright feared toons. They said we were abominations and were unholy: that we were malformed half-starts. Manifestations of some dark, strange non-life that seeped into humanity's state of being. That we were mistakes of reality. Cosmic abortions, some fanatics called us. That's why all the publicity for Toontown kept the hatred and fear under wraps. If the rest of the world knew how Angelinos treated their toon neighbors, they'd be appalled: especially the kids.

This moment in history was a time when humans were afraid that toons would enter the human workforce and steal all the jobs open to humans. Truth of the matter was, was that there were no jobs open to both toons and humans, so we couldn't have taken any jobs in the human workforce even if we wanted to. Now, I'm talking about your average-Joe toon, toons like us who weren't you're A-list celebrities like Bugs Bunny or Goofy. Your typical working class toon were oftentimes mocked openly in public by most humans. Thank God for the kids though! The kids were our champions whenever we were targeted in public. But after we started working for Judge Doom, we didn't go to Los Angeles as often except for out yearly two weeks off, where we spend a nice vacation in Catalina. By that point, everybody knew who we were. The kids who once cheered us on and defended us when Mommy and Daddy called us mistakes and wastes of space looked at us like they didn't know _what_ to make of us. That was how we wanted it of course. We wanted to command the respect of humans.

You also have to understand; this respect meant a lot to us. It meant we could go where most toons couldn't. We could go where humans went, including the strictly humans-only Ink and Paint Club. By sheer force, we wrestled our way into the public eye and struck fear into the hearts of toons everywhere. But this respect meant more to us than just being able to walk where humans walked. When we were hired by the city council, this was the happiest day of our short lives. Doom completely smashed the idea that toons couldn't get a job that by all rights _should_ have gone to a human, in the minds of the public. We had a job, we had the salary, we had the car, and the fear and respect of most of the public. We were _this_ close to being…real. That's what most toons really want. We want to be alive; not this borderline existence where we outlast our creators. We didn't want to be these creatures made of ink and paint; we wanted to be just like you are. But this job, and through Doom's guidance, we almost tasted humanity. Almost grasped reality.

We lost sight of that. By the point where we realized we were almost human, what with how high we'd climbed, the cancerous hatred had spread throughout our bodies, and we were real hateful chumps, let me tell you. You wouldn't want to look at us funny or we could do some real unpleasant things to you. We were walking little balls of hate and anger, resentful of how toons were treated, and how damned subservient the other toons were. Didn't they ever think to realize that half of the humans they met didn't like them? Stupid, blind fools. Most of them only cared about making people laugh. I now know that a lot of the bigoted toon-haters really just needed a laugh to change their minds. Most of them didn't understand why toons were even there to begin with, and that was to recapture the innocence of childhood. It was people like this, who hated and mocked us doubled with the obliviousness of our fellow toons that made us hate Toontown and all it stood for.


	4. Chapter 4

It was at this point that Judge Doom began experimenting with dip. And it was then that the group began to split up.

Doom began to tell us (and we were only happy to help) that the insanity in Toontown needed to be reined in. That it wasn't right for humans to be endangered by toons, nor that the more maniacal and uncooperative toons be allowed to play rough with fragile humans. So we set out to arrest and dip any toons that we felt were troublemakers. They were given a quick and speedy trial by a literal kangaroo court, always biased in favor of the prosecution (Doom). Then they were instantly dipped by whichever one of us was free to do so, erasing them from existence. This….I'll be blunt, because any other way to call it sounds worse... this genocide of toons was more than Slimy and Flasher could handle. In June of 1945, they quit the group, saying that we were turning into monsters, and we never saw them again after that. (They apparently weren't satisfied with what happened after our deaths, and, after they teamed up with another weasel, decided to bring Doom back. Once again, for more on this, read the semi-accurate comic book "The Resurrection of Doom")

As 1945 turned into 1946, our resentment of Toontown and the humans who lorded over it grew. By this time, we were also the leaders of disorganized crime in Toontown, taking protection money from businesses so we didn't raid them looking for lawbreakers they might be hiding, and pulling strings whenever and wherever we could. We were controlling most of the day-to-day runnings of Toontown, and raising Cain for any busybody humans. We would take any illegal human trespassers and bring them to Downtown Toontown, and we would draw toony body parts over their real ones to humiliate them, and send a warning not to poke their noses where they didn't belong. It was also convenient because Judge Doom was perfecting the details on his freeway scheme. He had got the idea from the city planners, who wanted to build what's now the Hollywood Freeway around Toontown. He, of course, wanted to build it right through Toontown.

He figured that Toontown wouldn't really be missed, what with how the toons were rigidly segregated and hated by most of the population. There was no law against killing toons, since he was the only one capable of doing it for "legitimate" reasons. He figured the consumer boom after the war would be the perfect time for this plan of his. We had it all thought out, and were ready to put it into gear by August of 1947. We were going to spread rumors of Jessica Rabbit's "affair" with Toontown's owner, Marvin Acme. The stress would eat away at Maroon Cartoon star Roger, causing the studio to lose a lot of money. Then we would bribe Acme to sell with the knowledge of the affair, and buy out both his property (including Toontown) and R.K Maroon's nearly bankrupt studio. This sale also included the red car line of Pacific Electric trolleys to a shell corporation, Cloverleaf Industries, of which Doom was the sole stockholder. Once we had our hands on the red car line, Acme's factory, Toontown, and Maroon Cartoons, we would destroy that whole tract to build one of Los Angeles' first freeways. Of course, we wanted to beat General Motors and Firestone at their own game. They were already working on the details on an identical plan for Los Angeles' transportation. We got the satisfaction of destroying the place we hated the most, getting a lot of money for being some of the last living toons, and show everybody what toons could do to bring this city into the future.

What we didn't count on was a loony rabbit, a meddling detective, and a blank piece of paper. Plan B was killing Acme if he didn't sell, and steal his will for ourselves until the probate courts decided Toontown was up for grabs. We already had Maroon Cartoons; we only needed Acme's property. So we framed Roger Rabbit for the murder of old man Acme, but we were missing the will. Turns out, Marvin Acme's will was in Roger's possession all this time. He wrote a love letter to his wife (who he never doubted was cheating on him) on the will, which was written in disappearing/reappearing ink, making it look like it was blank till the ink reappeared. Eddie Valiant, the brother of the detective Von Rotten/Doom murdered via a falling piano, was the guy who ultimately unraveled the case. During a big show down, he got us out of the way by causing us to die of laughter (I got kicked into a vat of Dip that Doom was going to use to destroy Toontown) and he fought with Judge Doom, who accidentally revealed his toon self to him. Of course, we were dead by this time, so we only heard this through word of mouth. Imagine our surprise when the toon-hating judge was actually a toon himself! And we thought _we_ were hypocrites! Well, as it turns out, Valiant won, the day was saved, blah blah blah happy ending.

The freeway, and all others around it were built around Toontown. But it turns out that our deaths actually did some good for the toons. In order to make sure that something like this never happened again, toon actors formed their own unions, as did most of the toon workforce. Places that were previously humans only were desegregated, and some toons even went to school and got married, side by side with humans! The public also grew to love and cherish Toontown for the innocent, happy place that it was in the 1950s and 1960s, but it faded out of the spotlight by the 1970s and 1980s. All that changed when Gary K. Wolfe wrote a neo-noir novel, based on the events of 1947 called "Who Censored Roger Rabbit?" where the story was changed to a Toontown made of comic strip characters, Jessica was a pornographic actress, and Roger Rabbit himself was a murderer.

That caught the attention of Disney's animators, as well as the toons of our generation, who were actually there. In secret, the Toons lobbies for this book to be made into a more accurate version of events, to make sure it stuck in the public's minds. They rounded up all the original toons who were there, and picked their brains for details about what happened back then. Forty re-writes later, a script that was a nearly perfect re-telling of what went on back then was greenlit for production. Shortly after that, in 1987, we were reanimated to play ourselves in the film. Imagine the culture shock! It was a heck of a trip knowing we were 40 years in the future. The boys remembered every second of their time in Toon Heaven; they were bored stiff.

It was especially bad for Wheezy because Heaven was strictly non-smoking. They pretty much spent 40 years cloud hopping in heaven, sick of the goody two shoes up there with their halos and wings… on the other hand, now they all play the harps like masters! But Heaven wasn't for them. They tried many times to escape, but they never succeeded. Everyone was even considering sending Heaven's grumpiest residents to toon Hell just to be rid of their boredom and complaining. Luckily we were brought back just in time, otherwise they'd have been stuck with your typical bulldog devil, bubbling in a cauldrons for all eternity. So much for them being charitable on the other side! Angelic my ass!

But me? It was like one second I was flying through the air about to die, praying for a miracle, and then poof! Next thing I know, I'm surrounded by hairspray, MTV and cocaine 40 years in the future! It took me a few months to adjust to it, but since it was all fresh in my mind, filming the movie was definitely a breeze. I was the best source of information during filming, because I remembered everything that everybody did, word for word. It was real nice to have others depend on me, or risk failing and looking like idiots because of it.

This is another important milestone in our lives, because it was our second chance. It re-set us back to what I guess you'd call our factory settings. We weren't evil no more. We had a clean slate, and we were back to being plain old toony evil, instead of pure evil. All went well until 1994 when Steven Spielberg and Disney had a falling out, cancelling any plans to do anything else with Roger Rabbit. The prequel script and CGI tests were abandoned, and so were the plans for future Disneyland rides. We were almost fading back into obscurity. Well, we decided to change that. We used what little money we had left from the commercial success of the film and merchandise to donate to the quickly sinking Toontown Historical Society. We helped them open up a long-overdue exhibit on the Cloverleaf Scandal. We recently went there to check out the exhibit, and amazingly, we weren't portrayed as monsters. We actually had their pity, which isn't what we'd have wanted back in 1947. We, after 28 years of working as secretary/consultants to T.P.D, we got our old jobs back. The car was ours- we purchased it for our own use in 1946- and the rickety house in the Wrong Side of the Tracks that Doom had bought for us as headquarters/home was also ours. All we needed was the OK from the city, backed by public support to re-form the Toon Patrol. We'd asked Slimy and Flasher to join us, but they said no; they had found spiritual nirvana after a visit to San Francisco back in 1967 and they were happy teaching yoga and selling organic coffee.

The public support was the easiest thing to win back. Every toon was happy to welcome us back as one of them. I guess you could say that we had a "Grinch" moment, where our hearts grew three sizes, and we finally realized we belonged to with the other toons, but none of us are really the sappy type. Toons have long memories, but forgiving hearts. Once they saw that we had changed, they welcomed us back.

Our next challenge was patrolling Toontown. Since we'd been gone, it had doubled in size, and between 1989 and the current year (2016), it's tripled in size to include toons from all walks of life. From anime to the Simpsons. We still had our underworld connections, which we used to help deal with a lot of problems that the city's outdated infrastructure couldn't cope with, like dripping paint in Old Toontown, running out of speech bubbles in Comic Strip Town, or the computer graphics in CGI Land going haywire. Quietly, we handed over a large bunch of money to fix these problems, and many more. Now we may be the "good" kind of villain, but we're still villains. We didn't really do that out of kindness: we did it because we were sick of getting calls from panicked Toons when their color was fading, or their pixels were rearranging themselves. We also did it to make patrolling Toontown much easier for ourselves. We now work the way we originally were supposed to. We help the Toontown police with the tougher cases when they're overworked, and call in reports of crime in the farther reaches of the city.

All in all, I think we're doing pretty damned good for a bunch of henchmen. We came from nothing, and we're finally somebodies. Sure, we aren't as popular as we used to be, but judging from all the Twitter posts and Tumblr roleplayers and fan art, we made an impact on everybody's childhood at some point. Who we were then and who we are now are two very different things. The old us would have just spent all our time stewing in hatred and yelling at clouds, wanting to be real like humans (that's actually possible now, thanks to the combined efforts of toon scientists. We tried humanizing ourselves and it isn't all it cracked up to be. Two words: bodily fluids). But for now, we're trying our best to keep with the times while not losing the '40s in us. That's the best anybody could ask for.

We may have originally lost sight of what drives us, but not anymore. Now we spend our days kicking butt, taking names, striking fear in the best possible way, keeping the citizens safe (for a profit of course- our help still doesn't come cheap) and still pull the occasional string in the underworld. So long as we keep bringing joy to the fans, the respect/fear of our fellow toons and money in our pockets, we could exist like this forever

I think we finally found a real villain's happy ending.

-Smart-Ass the weasel

Ghostwritten from chats online with ToonPatrolOFCL on Twitter by TheRatKing1 aka NumismatistNut. The both of us are also on Tumblr. los-angeles-toon-patrol and classifiedpenguin

Go and follow the weasels for more toony content in your daily lives, and me for possibly more stories in collaboration with them!


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